Stripe is now ditching the idea of having bitcoin as one of its payment Method

Stripe stated four years ago that it will be the first major online payment platform to accept Bitcoin as payment. But on Tuesday, The company said Tuesday that the cryptocurrency had almost become a victim of its own popularity — the time needed to complete a transaction has increased, meaning that payments sometimes fail. And the rise in transaction fees helped convince Stripe that bitcoin is meant to be more of an asset and less of a currency for daily payments.

By the time the transaction is confirmed, fluctuations in bitcoin price mean that it’s for the ‘wrong’ amount,” Stripe’s Tom Karlo said. “For a regular bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of U.S. dollars is common, making bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires.”

So the company said it doesn’t make sense to keep allowing merchants to accept a payment method that no one wants to use.

For a regular Bitcoin transaction, a fee of tens of US dollars is common, making Bitcoin transactions about as expensive as bank wires, Mr Karlo wrote.

But it said its decision to end support for Bitcoin payments did not mean it was giving up on cryptocurrencies all together.

We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.

So, we will continue to pay close attention to the ecosystem and to look for opportunities to help our customers by adding support for cryptocurrencies and new distributed protocols in the future.

I believe Stellar's recent price action (+~15% today) is a result of this news. Stellar is an incredible platform and I think we're going to see very big things in 2018. Transactions clear in seconds and fees are extremely minimal. There's no way I could do Stellar justice in a sitting though so I would suggest looking into it if you haven't yet.